Worldwide, over two billion people are infected with tuberculosis (TB), and an estimated 14,400,000 people have active cases of TB. Of these active cases, 83% are located in Africa, South-East Asia and the Western Pacific region. The global impact of TB is enormous: each year, TB kills 1.5 million HIV-negative people and 0.2 million HIV-positive people. New drug resistant strains emerge each year.
The current treatment for active, drug-susceptible TB includes a carefully-monitored regimen of a cocktail of rifampin, isoniazid, pyrazinamide and ethambutol for two months, followed by an additional four months of rifampin and isoniazid. Multi-drug resistant TB infection requires a lengthy course of therapy lasting two years or more with drugs that are expensive and poorly tolerated. Because of their length, complexity, and expense, these regimens represent inadequate therapies for most TB cases. New therapeutics are urgently needed to combat TB infection, yet no new drugs have been approved to treat TB in over 40 years.
In addition, in a different technical area, a large number of fungi are known to grow at the expense of commercially important plants that are essential to human survival. A number of fungicides have been developed for use in protecting both ornamental plants and food crops from pathogenic fungi. While many safe and effective fungicides are currently in use, the evolution of pathogenic fungi and the ever-increasing pressure to use lower levels of fungicides create the need for new fungicides. Effective antifungal treatments are urgently needed to treat damaging fungal infections in plant species.